I ignored him, set the journal down on one of the messy tables, and hurriedly went down the floor.
I looked through the different pages he had used to create the map and picked one.
I snatched it and jumped back on my feet, riding to him.
"Look at this!" I pointed at the paper.
He raised a brow. "What am I looking at?"
I looked back at the paper and realized I was holding it from behind.
"Sorry," I said quickly as I flipped it back to show the drawing of the map. "Look at this now."
"I still have no idea what I’m supposed to be looking at." He shook his head. "I drew the map, remember?"
"Look! You’ve been saying you’re stuck and unable to move, drawing any more maps, didn’t you?" I asked him. "Even though you’ve deciphered the languages already, right?"
He gave a light shrug. "I guess? Perhaps"
"And the map is drawn following the constellation, isn’t it?" I pressed.
He grumbled. "Yes. Jasmine, what does this have to do with anything?"
He rubbed his still red eyes.
"From what Hildegard had just told me." I continued. "We live in different time zones. Predominantly, the royal pack, at least yes?"
He rolled his eyes, trying to understand where I was getting at.
"Yes." He folded his arms.
"Good." I nodded my head. "And I was also told that the constellation armed shaped differently. I mean, they are the same thing. But when someone is looking at Selene’s star in the Fire pack, they won’t be looking at it here."
He rubbed his back, bored.
"You don’t see it?!" I demanded excitedly. "We’ve been drawing it wrong this entire time! Whoever wrote the languages to be deciphered didn’t do it here. I mean, the books were with Xaden’s mother, and that’s far away in the crescent pack."
He snapped his finger.
"Do you now understand what I’m saying?" I asked.
He smacked his hand on his forehead. "Goddess! Why didn’t I think of that?"
And he went back down to the floor and began to scamper through the pieces of paper.
He picked up a half-drawn map and came to me.
"So this means we have done it wrong the entire time." He said after looking through the paper.
I gave a slight shrug and swallowed hard.
"I think so." I managed.
He started to swear in anger.
He threw swear words that I doubted I wanted to know what they meant.
After a few minutes of his tantrum, he calmed down.
He was breathing hard, still frantic.
"So now we have to start again," I said quietly, discussing the elephant in the room.
All our hard work for the past days had gone to waste.
I personally wanted to lose my mind because we had hoped that finishing the map would somehow lead us to finding my uncle.
Now I didn’t know much about that anymore.
I dropped onto a chair weakly, my shoulders giving up in defeat.
I heaved a heavy sigh and looked back at an angry-looking Otto.
"Well." I tried to give a smile that wavered. "On the bright side. We know where to start and how to end. Regardless of how long it’s going to take."
"We don’t!" He snapped at me.
I was taken aback by how sharp he had been.
He saw my reaction, and his face pulled with sympathy.
"I’m sorry." He said, rubbing his temples. "I’m just..... It’s just that I’ve been doing these so much, I finally put in full hope that we’re going to do something about it. I was going to finally prove my theory that the other side actually does exist and isn’t just a legend or some boring story."
In a way, I did understand what he was saying.
Having everyone look at you from a specific perspective.
You try so much that you give up.
In his own case, everyone saw him as the madman whose wolf had gone rabid.
This was his chance to prove that he was always right, and now, all of a sudden, he was back to square one.
I got up from my feet. "Hey, don’t worry. I know how it feels. And I understand you want to prove everyone wrong. But it won’t change anything if you’re so beat up about yourself. Trust me, I’ve learned the hard way. We made a mistake, didn’t we? But we found the solution."
He ruffled his messy hair. "That’s the thing, Jasmine. We don’t have a solution."
I blinked.
Hadn’t he heard a word I had said about the different constellations?
"The constellations here are different, yes. But it’s also different from every other pack." He said. "We have about nine different constellations. Some packs within the same proximity see the same constellations. Others don’t."
I wanted to lose my mind.
If this were true, would that mean we had to translate and map all nine constellations?
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